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Description

Cargo handling equipment and records from Wharf No. 5 Darling Harbour, comprising: a hooked pole for rafting logs, a 'peewee bar' for rolling logs, a klaxon on a stand, a block for hooking up to a crane below decks, two large and one small hand trucks, a first aid stretcher, a Wilson Rescue Hoist in box with printed instructions, a number of photographs, training records, Board of Trade regulations book 'Carrying Dangerous Goods at Sea', a passenger ship sign 'Due to Security etc…', 2 automatic twist locks for containers, 2 bridge fittings for containers, a plate clamp for carrying steel plates, a wire splicing bench, a tally box labelled Johnson, a box of slides for training purposes.

SignificanceThe Hungry Mile is an icon of the Australian labour movement. The closure of stevedoring operations in Sydney Harbour has been part of a significant transformation of a working port.

HistoryIn 2007 the cargo handling wharves at East Darling Harbour were closed for redevelopment. The site, once called the Hungry Mile after the great queues of unemployed workers who lined the docks looking for work during the Great Depression of the 1930s, was renamed Barangaroo, after the Aboriginal man Bennelong's wife, who was associated with the area in the late 18th century.

As stevedoring operations moved to ports at Port Botany and Port Kembla, the Government of New South Wales determined that the wharves at East Darling Harbour should become an extension of the Sydney CBD with a foreshore park and business and shopping precincts.

The Maritime Union of Australia undertook a campaign to recognise the Hungry Mile name, as an acknowledgement of the site's historical significance to waterside workers since the first formation of a maritime workers union - the Sydney Wharf Labourers Union in 1872. After maritime workers variously began organizing trade unions during the late nineteenth century in many Australian ports, by 1902 the two largest sectors of the maritime workforce, the seamen and the wharf labourers, or 'wharfies', had established their own national trade union organisations - the Seamen’s Union of Australia (SUA) and Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF).

As a major cargo handling point in Sydney, the East Darling Harbour wharves were the site of significant historical activity including the 1890 and 1928 maritime strikes, bans on Japanese shipments prior to the Second World War, and bans and
protests against South African apartheid and the Vietnam War.

The objects here record the final phase of stevedoring operations at East Darling Harbour.

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